After a trip through the Sahel region of Africa (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Senegal), the UN and World Bank pledged $200 million over the next two years to improving maternal and child health programs, according to both the UN News Centre and The World Bank’s website. Initiated as a response to Niger’s “Call to Action,” the money will go to funding the Sahel Women’s Empowerment and Demographics Project, which works to raise the age of marriage, keep girls in school and enable women to choose the amount of children they want and when they want to have them.

The money is coming after the UNFPA released the State of World Population 2013 report, which found that out of 7.3 million births 2 million were from girls under the age of 14 and 70,000 girls from developing countries die each year as a result of complications from child birth, according to another article from the UN News Centre. The best thing to come from the report is the realization that the girl is not the only one to blame in the case of teen pregnancy. UNFPA Executive Director Babatunde Osotimehin is quoted as saying:

“Too often, society blames only the girl for getting pregnant. The reality is that adolescent pregnancy is most often not the result of deliberate choice, but rather the absence of choices, and of circumstances beyond the girl’s control. It is the consequence of little or no access to school, employment, quality information and health care.”

I see this investment by the World Bank and the UN as a good first step so long as the money is not solely used to buy and distribute condoms or run a class for sexual health, as has been done in the past. Not that these initiatives are completely useless, but a combination of education and economic opportunity needs to be presented to these girls so they know how to prevent pregnancy and know that other alternatives are out there for their future. And it must not be solely focused on the girl. While her education is imperative, the attitudes within the society must be addressed as well. The society must view girls as potentially productive members and must value that potential so that girls are encouraged to stay in school, young mothers have support systems and girls have access to reproductive health information.

The article goes on to state economic reasons for countries to invest in preventing pregnancy in young girls. In a country like Kenya, the UNFPA estimates that if the 200,000 teen moms were employed instead of getting pregnant, the country would earn an extra $3.4 billion. While this plays to the human capitalist inside of me (as shown by last week’s post about the MDGs and human capital), the statistic seems a bit pessimistic. Just because a woman has a baby at a young age (or what the west considers a young age) does not mean that she will not become a productive member of society, as defined in economic terms. Yes, the odds are against her and yes, statistics do show that most teen moms do not go on to finish schooling but this says to me that their potential has been wasted and that may not be true. Yet again, girls need to be educated on these issues and societal views need to change so that girls can reach their full potential, even if that does mean still choosing to have a young family.

Pledging $200 million to empowering women is a fete since previously the global community only gives two cents out of every dollar spent on development to adolescent girls. Whether this is enough to change the attitude of the societies towards valuing women, we will have to wait and see.